An opening scene reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead, with a musical score eerily similar, (and similarly eerie,) to that of Halloween, caught me right away! I was in. Here’s what happened next.
A coupla’ shotgun totin’ dudes in a blue Peugot wagon park on the side of a forest road. They then stumble across a young woman giving herself a spongebath out of a bucket in the woods. They identify themselves as Federal Marshals and promptly blow her away.
The young woman’s cohorts show up and quickly kill the marshals. It turns out that she was a member of a group of illegal pot-growers harvesting their weed grown on federal land, (I guess nowadays, they’d be referred to as ‘Narco-Terrorists.)
Meanwhile, back at H.Q. the higher-ups are worried about their missing agents and even more worried about not nabbing the weed-growers. They make the decision to hire a local crop duster and spray the area in question with a highly experimental new pesticide.
There’s your “Annnd there it is” moment.
Shortly thereafter, crop duster and crop dustees show signs of sickness and exhibit behaviors of general homicidal unpleasantness.
The plot is minimal: Infect a group of people, and have them terrorize others. Zombie encounters are few, with victims being just assorted campers and passersby.
And the “Zombies” themselves aren’t really Zombies per se. They aren’t dead, undead, or voodoo-spawned. In fact, for 1980, they may be among the earliest of the ‘rage infected’ Z’s, (only 7 years after Romero’s ‘The Crazies,’ in 1973.)
The zombies, (for lack of a better term,) are slow and shambolic, and seemingly mindless, but will use tools such as an axe, a machete, and even torches. They are said to be cannbalistic, but their bites do not spread the illness. Also, they can be killed much the way any human can be. Their make up is minimal, too - just a few scabs, some blood stains, and an overall unkempt appearance.
The protagonists are interesting. A forestry worker and his wife going fishing trip with his brother, a couple of kids whose parents were killed by the infected, and a few assorted others. And, of course, the crop duster and his wife, (both of whose overacting I enjoyed very much!)
There are a few others here and there but the cast is kept small, almost definitely due to budget constraints. The characters are portrayed well enough, I can't say good acting, but not nearly as bad as what some other reviewers of Toxic Zombies have said.
Obviously, this was a low-budget production. I mean, that blue Peugot from the opening scene got used two more times in this film! So, make-up, acting, and effects all suffer from those limited resources.
There is some gore and violence but it’s limited, and not nearly enough to warrant the R rating it boasted in the opening.
This movie got a lot of hate on IMDb, and much of it warranted. But I kinda liked it. I didn’t love it, and I acknowledge it was NOT a great movie, but don’t believe all the hate.
The full-length film can be found free on a coupla' streaming services as of this writing, Plex and Roku, specifically. And YouTube has a trailer, (of course,) to convince you one way or the other.
Trailer, here: TOXIC ZOMBIES, (AKA Bloodeaters!)
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